I guess we should expect a price hike sometime in June then

I would like to predict the future too but alas I'm quite bad at it

Yeah you're right. It is quite a lot, especially with this kind of an IP and expectations to deal with

I would say Forza Motorsport reboot had its issues, Flight Simulator 2024 had issues with cloud infra and Red Fall had various bugs and T poses.

They were playable so I agree with you on that, except FS24

Actually there are two studios within Playground Games, I'm sure there's cross pollination but the other studio is still making Forza supposedly.

"Late is just for a little while, suck is forever"

• Lord Gabe

Thanks for sharing!

How's LA noire gameplay holding up?

You're in for a ride! Make sure you wait for dialogues of NPCs to fully end when passing by.

I mean Skyrim is kinda cool. In similar vain I really really enjoyed Kingdom Come Deliverance 1, waiting for KCD2 to get all its DLCs before I jump into it. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas was also pretty good considering its age. I found Control to have a very addictive and unique gameplay. Special mention to The Last of Us part 1 and 2, as they had really seamless integration of gameplay, narrative and atmosphere.

Mafia 1 DE and 2 both were largely linear and didn't waste your time with fluff. I really enjoyed those two. Mafia 3 on the other hand had good story drip fed to you after hours of grind.

Ubisoft like mechanics:

• Each area has wiretaps that help a lot, but are very much like liberating radio towers, less grand.
• Once you open up a district, you've to do a checklist of repetitive missions, x2, and then go back to one of the areas from the already done missions to kill the underboss. Rinse and repeat 9 times. So that becomes more like (6 missions + 1) x 2 x 9. Some missions are optional. But it's quite a lot. There's some variety and some interesting story beats, but when it's given in such grindy manner you have to have a lot of patience to enjoy it.
• A lot of the missions are set up like far cry outposts or assassinate a target style. In fact you are incentivised to play stealth, to the point you start feeling like an assassin or hitman.

Mafia 3. I'm probably half way through and starting to get burnt out by the grind and the buggy nature of the game. It is infected by Ubisoft formula, but it's much more notorious and less fluid. Glad they are going a different route for Mafia 4

Pretty cool that AMD stuck the landing, rather exceeding the expectations by beating DLSS CNN. Sure transformer model is better but it is slightly more costly too, and this is effectively v1 of FSR with ML. This is especially great coming off of shimmering woes of PSSR.

Now the competitive edge moves from DLSS and RT to Multi Frame Gen and Path Tracing. I find the newer goal post to be less exciting for sub $500 GPUs as the added latency or lower base frame rate isn't justified, so in a way AMD is genuinely a better choice this time around for the price range.

Let's hope the $200-400 segment also sees such competition thanks to Intel.

It is plausible, fair enough. I still think reaching the finish line is still good, as mentioned in the original post.

slithers away

Actually I don't disagree with your premise. I definitely think US studios have either sat on their laurels or have had troubled development.

The pivot changed art style, scope and even lore and vibe of the game as per Carrie Patel. The lore exists for the world but living lands from what I nice l know were never fully detailed.

Regardless, the game's developement definitely went through trouble despite Microsoft's funding.

I was just mentioning that while it took 7 years since conception but the single player version is rather new. And pointing that out isn't some save, just an acknowledgement that the game did go through some crisis in development.

I don't know since I've only played DE, but the sound tracks were very nostalgic and reminiscent of game radios like Fallout 3.

Me too. Practically 0 difference, works for me!

Sounds good. I really like changes that just flow from start to end, though they're rare. It's easy to forget about collectibles if they're too annoying, so that's that.

That sounds great! I'll be playing it on Series X, should be okay.

As per interviews Awoved pivoted in 2021 from dark multiplayer to what it is now. What that tells us is that it could've been something like Suicide Squad/Gotham Knights/Veilguard, but they successfully pivoted in the end.